Best internet law books according to redditors

That's because it doesn't violate the 4th Amendment.

I'm 1000% in support of the RestoretheFourth kids, but the fact is, the 4th Amendment has been eroded away to practically nothing over the course of 200ish years of case law -- and it's been accelerating since the 1970s. The common understanding of "privacy" and the legal understanding are wildly different.

For more, read the excellent Nothing to Hide (don't click unless you don't mind being put on a watchlist).

I wish it weren't so, but the Fourth Amendment is kind of already super broken. Legal arguments against surveillance are better served, IMO, by basing them on the chilling effects they have on the First Amendment rights of the survielled.

Hey, those are literally my specialties! (I'm a lawyer / registered patent attorney / former media law professor.)

If you're just getting into these areas, the In a Nutshell books are actually a pretty decent place to start.

http://www.amazon.com/Patent-Law-Nutshell-Martin-Adelman/dp/0314279997

http://www.amazon.com/Global-Internet-Nutshell-Michael-Rustad/dp/0314283307

Cyber/internet law is kind of a nebulous concept, because it's primarily regular law, applied to the internet. It's one of those things that non-lawyers like to argue about, because everyone has ideas about how things should work, and so there's a lot of popular media written for a lay audience. For thought leaders when it comes to internet law, I'd recommend Lawrence Lessig, Ryan Calo, Jonathan Zittrain, Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu. There are also groups, like the EFF and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, that have a lot of good resources.

Patent law is different -- it's incredibly complex, which is why it has its own additional exam that attorneys need to pass in order to prosecute patents (not to litigate them, though). Laypeople still have their own ideas about patent law, but generally those ideas boil down to "patent trolls are bad, mmmmkay?" Due to the complexity of the field, there's not much written for non-lawyers.

A lot of laypeople tend to conflate patent law with copyright law, and the fact that you didn't mention it here suggests that you may be doing the same. To quickly disambiguate them, patents prevent you from synthesizing a patented pharmaceutical, whereas copyrights prevent you from pirating movies.

Copyright law is pretty hotly contested amongst the laity, and more than a few lawyers think that the field needs a bit of reform. However, whereas non-lawyers tend to think that copyright law needs reform because of some misguided notion about how the internet makes sharing information easy, so we shouldn't have copyrights, the legal community tends to think copyright reform should focus on things like reducing the term of copyright protection to a more reasonable number of decades.

When you look for thought leaders about copyright, despite it being a pretty popular topic on the internet, you're not going to find as much (although, you'll see a lot of the same people who talk about internet law also writing about copyright). The reason for this is that the whole internet piracy/copyright debate basically went nowhere way back in the late 90s/early 2000s, and it's reached a pretty stable, logical place in the law. There are pro-piracy websites written by non-lawyers (e.g., Torrent Freak) that are kind of the holocaust-deniers of copyright law (and thus get the appropriate adoration from like-minded folks), but I'm having a hard time coming up with many academic writers of note that supports that position. Charles Nesson (who actually founded the Berkman Center, if I'm remembering right) could probably be called sympathetic, but I'm not very familiar with his work.

I'd have to refer you to the linked article and the book it refers to; I don't know any good examples.

But I think it's best not to respond to "I have nothing to hide" with "Yes you do." Privacy isn't about hiding things from the government. It's the issues of government power which are more important.

There's also a book (which I have not yet read), Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff between Privacy and Security, also by Daniel Solove.

Here are a series of books used by law students when taking those courses. The Example and Explanations and hornbooks series are a go to in law school (I used them in most classes). A lot of law school focuses on casebooks, but these cover the principles and nuts and bolts of the subjects.

https://www.amazon.com/Examples-Explanations-Corporations-Alan-Palmiter/dp/1454850167/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1502458522&sr=8-5&keywords=corporate+law

https://www.amazon.com/Business-Organizations-Law-Hornbooks-James/dp/1634592271/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1502458463&sr=8-2&keywords=business+law+hornbook


https://www.amazon.com/Examples-Explanations-Contracts-Brian-Blum/dp/1454868414/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1502458487&sr=8-1&keywords=contracts+examples+and+explanations

https://www.amazon.com/Examples-Explanations-Intellectual-Stephen-McJohn/dp/1454850159/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1502458793&sr=1-1&keywords=intellectual+property+examples+and+explanations

Casebooks:

https://www.amazon.com/Cyberlaw-Problems-Jurisprudence-Information-American/dp/0314917535/ref=sr_1_12?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1502458711&sr=1-12&keywords=cyber+law

That was a funny solution a Cracked writer proposed to the whole debate, to free multiplayer games from singleplayer games so they can quit hassling each other. It solves some problems, creates others.

Technically my reading list moved away from game academia a while ago. I'm just a hobby writer, I don't worry about the same issues they do. I was a game critic for 3 years at Popmatters while I was in law school and I steadily got more interested in rule theory. That's most of what I do now in my writing.

I don't really know where someone could start with that...probably by studying systems. This is an outstanding intro book for it. Something bit more sophisticated on rule systems would be this one on how they are presented

I can start rattling off the legal philosophers but they are such boring old farts...Greg Lastowka wrote what is probably the best book on game design and law.

So jealous! My computer law text is not nearly as fun...

You know, though, there's a good reason that politics is the first arena where this phenomenon being applicable comes to mind.

I love how the internet allows for niche communities to flourish, but when combined with the group polarization phenomenon and compounded by the fragmentation of any common national conversation/event/discourse/information source/etc, then the implications for the public space are really scary.

Highly, highly recommend Cass Sunstein's "Republic.com" (http://www.amazon.com/Republic-com-2-0-Cass-R-Sunstein/dp/0691143285) for a really fascinating take on this topic. Think it explains more about contemporary politics than almost any other book I've read in the past decade.

Looking for this book

https://www.amazon.com/Information-Technology-Law-Society/dp/0198732465

Andrew Murray
Information Technology Law: The Law and Society

3rd Edition
ISBN-13: 978-0198732464

$10

I think it's important to not swing between two extremes - "nothing to hide" and "tor only". It's not all-or-nothing situation; different situations call for different levels of privacy.

One of the issues in the Information age is nothing is ever forgotten, information stays around in the servers and becomes searchable. How many risks would you take talking about the controversial subject if it is automatically linked to your Real Identity and practically unforgettable?

Here's analogy we can try - people can start different businesses, but one of the options they have is that they can start a LLC so they don't have to be personally liable. What would happen if structures like LLCs are discontinued and all businesses have to have owners who in the end have to assume liability with personal assets? I think you know what I am getting at.

"I got nothing to hide" is probably a fallacy and a misplaced trust in human nature especially when it comes to using power, be it commercial or governmental. This argument is mostly used when talked about unwarranted surveillance in which case the point should be that tracking people unsuspected of a crime is a wrong thing to do under any circumstances and not having anything to hide does not make the surveillance ok.
Further reading: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0300172311/

In general, I think the anonymity or very least using aliases has done very well for reddit. The discussion has been frank and let many people discuss subjects that otherwise they would have not been able to although at the same time kicking up youthful hubris here and there but nothing like unpalatable levels or 4chan.

Try this one: http://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Hide-Tradeoff-between-Security/dp/0300172338

It's not about any particular technology, but it helps debunk one of the most baseless but infuriatingly-prevalent misconceptions about privacy: that being that "If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide."

Well, if you're interested in the subject, I'll also recommend Helen Nissenbaum's Privacy In Context. I'm actually doing research with her for the year, related to her theory of contextual integrity. IMO, contextual integrity is the best theoretical description out there of what we really mean when we say we have a "right to privacy." The book just came out a couple years ago, and we're working on how to apply it in a legal context.

I would also recommend reading Daniel Solove's book, Nothing to Hide. It makes a persuasive argument about how you shouldn't have to give up privacy for more security.